The University of Washington Alumni Association does these environmental lectures every year. The series is on Tuesday nights for eight weeks. Last year the talks were about coffee and I went to all of them and they were great. This year it is about top-level economic policy on food production, and the series is called “Food: Eating your Environment.” I just went to the third one last night.
The first one was a talk by Gebisa Ejeta, who is an Ethiopian geneticist who won a food production prize. I am sure he does good work but he deadpanned through an entirely scripted presentation and read the extensive text within his own slideshow to us. I appreciate when developing countries are able to produce researchers who can contribute to the extant body of scientific knowledge and really think that academic collaboration between universities in the developed and developing world is key to solving all world problems, but I am continually baffled at how this always seems to play out by the brightest people from poor countries seeming to have shucked the personalities from their souls and giving the most boring and least inviting presentations possible. If I ever had any say in coordinating these things I would try to coach the speakers to do something, anything, to prove their humanity and invite people to connect to them if they have interest in the matter in which the speaker presents. Rarely have I ever seen a chart of numbers and written to the author on that account; less often still have I sought someone who reads such charts to crowds without any context. I feel bad for situations like this because I know that a lot of starving people are depending on this guy to change their region for the better and attract attention, and the need would have been better served by having a trained presenter act as proxy to do lectures like this while perhaps having the actual invited guest just field the questions or something.
The next week it was a Stanford person named Roz Naylor talking about biofuels. Various nations try to grow crops to produce biofuel; the US does corn, Brazil does sugarcane, the EU does rape, and Indonesia does palm oil. 35% of the US’s corn goes to ethanol. For lots of reasons, many countries want to buy farmland for food production in other countries, and the countries which sell or lease their land to foreign powers for this purpose are Cambodia, Ethiopia, Liberia, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Sudan.
Last night it was NYU’s Marion Nestle talking about how public policy affects nutritional health. She said that in the 1970s in America the policy went from farmers being paid to grow non-food crops to farmers having food crops subsidized, so that resulted in more food being available. With more food available, commercial entities had some market pressure to encourage people to eat more, and thus advertising which encouraged obesity came to be. She talked about a rule in Obama’s recent healthcare reform thing that will require fast food places nationwide to post the calories contained in their food along with a notice that adults typically should not eat more than 2000 calories a day. This already happens in NYC, and I am happy for this. There are lots of things which the government could do to promote health and I want to see more of them happen.